Rakuten is not alone in embracing open RAN architectures as a way to reduce cost and increase competitive agility in the Japanese 5G market. Market leader NTT Docomo has already run extensive trials based on the O-RAN Alliance’s interfaces and architecture, and has now announced the results of a collaborative effort to develop an O-RAN baseband unit. This will be a central element of Docomo’s emerging virtualized RAN and its migration towards end-to-end cloud-native technology. Its new baseband unit (BBU) architecture can support centralized or distributed units (CUs or DUs) in the O-RAN architecture, and was developed with NEC and Samsung. It can interface to an O-RAN compliant radio unit from any vendor, the MNO said, but also supports an…